Wednesday, February 06, 2019

Oracle Didn’t See the Data Reckoning Coming | Bloomberg

Data broker broken

"Data Cloud’s software enables an advertiser to target people based on what they buy in stores; the websites they visit; their likes, interests, and musings on social media; and even what they’re looking at on their screens. It also helps an advertiser manage its Facebook and Twitter campaigns. If Company X wants to, it can ask Oracle to find people looking at images of its SUV, add the information to its consumer profiles, and then upload the data to Facebook, where the carmaker can target those people with ads for the same model.

That last part has gotten tougher in the past year. In March, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed just how casually Facebook Inc. had shared user data with other companies for years, the social network’s clampdown on its own systems became a serious problem for Oracle, say two former staffers and another person familiar with the matter, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. By fall, Facebook promised, Oracle and other companies would have to get more consumer consent to use data that helped brands target ads on its network, and Facebook would stop selling ad data on behalf of such third parties. Facebook confirmed that it canceled two partner programs but declined to comment further.

Before the Cambridge story broke, it wasn’t uncommon for Oracle account managers to do 40 percent of their business on Facebook, says one of the former staffers. So while Oracle tried to get Facebook workarounds in place, account managers scrambled to push clients toward Twitter, Pinterest, and other alternatives that at least kept them spending money, that person says. At the same time, the list of companies supplying Oracle with profile data fell by as much as half, they say, because many of those companies couldn’t comply with Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation ahead of its enforcement deadline last May. Oracle says it doesn’t push clients to favor one platform or another, that it has more than made up for its lost data inputs with new partners in other markets, and that Facebook remains a key partner."